Amerithrax (16 page)
The letter was sent on to the Federal Bureau of Investi- gation for further action. The FBI knew the U.S. Army con- ducted top secret biological warfare research at the Institute. In 1997, when cutbacks during the previous administration slashed funding, Col. David Franz, commander at the Insti- tute, had to fire some staff. At first he laid off technicians, then began firing scientists. Older scientists like Dr. Assaad were allegedly chosen for the job cuts. After losing his job, Dr. Assaad filed a still-pending age discrimination lawsuit against the government. His suit told of “a bizarre and vi- cious atmosphere” at the Institute in which he and other Arab scientists (all U.S. citizens with top-security clear- ances) were ridiculed, denigrated, and subjected to racial slurs and harassment. A self-styled “Camel Club” awarded a rubber camel as a prize for the worst performance of the week. Assaad’s lawyer, Rosemary McDermott, stated that there were people at Fort Detrick who harbored an “intense dislike” of Dr. Assaad, particularly a rival, a ricin research colleague. Studying the vicious letter, the agents agreed: somebody sure didn’t like him.
On Wednesday morning, Dr. Assaad arrived at the FBI’s field office in downtown Washington to answer a few ques- tions. He ended the day sitting in a windowless cell being interrogated. Of course he had a motive. He had been laid off from USAMRIID, but then so had many others who had lost their security clearances at facilities where anthrax was handled or stored. When agents showed him the poison pen letter, Assaad burst into tears.
Later, after O’Connor was stricken with cutaneous an- thrax and talk of the anthrax letters was on everyone’s lips, Assaad said he believed the person who composed the anon- ymous letter to the FBI and the person who sent the anthrax- laced envelopes, with messages praising Allah and
denouncing Americans, to NBC and the
New York Post
, was one and the same. “My theory is,” he told the press, “who- ever this person is knew in advance what was going to hap- pen [and named me as a] scapegoat for this action. You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to put two and two together.” The anonymous letter was sent eight or nine days before the first anthrax case was announced.
The FBI believed Assaad was the victim of a false ac- cusation. After clearing him of any involvement in the letter attacks, they began looking into a link between the anony- mous letter writer and Amerithrax, the FBI’s code name for the anthrax killer of Bob Stevens.
Ms. McDermott said that Dr. Assaad believed the letter to the FBI “was a deliberate attempt to frame him” by a former colleague. In history scientists have been notoriously jealous of each other. The first American crime to attract national attention was committed by a scientist. Dr. John White Webster, professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard, murdered Dr. George Parkman in 1849, dissected him, burned the corpse in his lab furnace, and put the left- overs in the dissection vault.
Had Amerithrax been the author? Had he written the As- saad letter to settle a personal score? The wording was vague, but suggested that the writer of the letter had knowl- edge of the anthrax letters mailed September 18. Assaad was falsely accused of “planning to mount a possible biological attack” at a time when only the culprit knew that a biological crime had already been committed. Amerithrax must have waited impatiently for a week for a reaction before sending the Assaad letter. Stevens had not yet taken ill. One letter had gone missing. The first wave of death had apparently failed to generate the panic Amerithrax had hoped for. The nation’s anthrax scare only began on October 4, the day after Assaad’s interrogation.
AS
yet no one knew what Amerithrax’s secret lab looked like, but logic and speculation suggested its essential makeup. Investigators theorized this layout: He kept his in- ner bacteriological lab dark to screen out ultraviolet rays
But first of all Amerithrax had needed a virulent strain of anthrax to weaponize. Where he had obtained the bacteria was the unanswered question. Amerithrax would need a se- cure staging area, a Biosafety Level 2 area that might only be a kitchen, bathroom, or hallway. Inside this entry cham- ber, lit by a blue ultraviolet light, would be a decon shower—possibly only a tub of bleach detergent and water. To protect himself he might don a Hazmat suit with a res- pirator or an Army surplus gas mask (though the FBI be- lieved Amerithrax was inoculated against anthrax). In either case he would pull on a pair or two of disposable gloves made of lightweight nitrile, latex, or vinyl and wear some sort of plastic head covering.
Amerithrax’s working lab, Level 3, would be kept under active negative air pressure—a ventilation system as simple as a window fan that sucked air out of the room through a HEPA filter into the outdoors. Air drawn into the lab entered through another vent. All other windows were sealed with duct tape. Possibly Amerithrax bought his equipment over the counter—pipes, glassware filters, a fermenter to breed colonies of anthrax, and the nutrients to propel rapid growth and spore formation. Harvested anthrax slurry could be processed by a pharmaceutical sprayer into cakes. A sec- ondhand horizontal or vertical milling machine would be needed to grind down dried spores to the most infectious size. Or he might have jury-rigged a makeshift pulverizer filled with steel ball bearings for small quantity processing. On the most rudimentary level, his equipment might consist of a heat lamp and thermostat, a pressure cooker, boxes of Q-tips, and bouillon cubes to brew, dry, and convert his spores into microscopic “lung-friendly” particles.
Several years earlier, government agents involved in a top secret Pentagon project had fanned out across the coun- try to see if they could secretly construct a biowarfare lab. The agents had found it remarkably easy to buy all neces-
SOMEWHERE
in America a glove box threw its illumi- nated light onto intent features shielded by transparent plas- tic and framed in the center of a square hood. The rasp of an oxygen tank could be heard. Amerithrax adjusted his bulky containment suit. It might even have been homemade.
Amerithrax moved deliberately. The spores he used were so light and so refined that it was hard to get them onto a slide. The airy spores kept floating off, flying off the spatula he used to fill the envelope. Getting his gossamer anthrax into envelopes was a ticklish endeavor. He inserted his arms through the long attached gloves and reached midway into the sealed airtight chamber. This allowed him to manipulate a vial taken from the processing lab. He slowly poured some anthrax onto a letter—anthrax more potent and more easily disbursed than that on the NBC and
Post
letters. The spores were a different size, smaller and more deadly. He had re- fined them to get rid of impurities such as dead anthrax germs that had been in his first mailing. Fine powdered an- thrax made spores more deadly. The spores would not stick to tape, but they would anchor inside human lungs. Amer- ithrax may have become angry when the media panic he had envisioned did not ensue. Perhaps he said to himself, “I’ll show them. I’ll make the spores more deadly, the letters more obvious and shoot for a higher profile target.” Now he would attempt to assassinate two senators. Along the way a lot of innocent people got murdered.
He had laid out the first of two unfolded letters and two preaddressed and prestamped envelopes inside the glove box. This time his targets were not the media, but political targets—two U.S. senators. Both were Democrats. He had made two very specific choices. He knew what committees they sat on and what speeches they had recently given. He
had written a very interesting letter and made very interest- ing choices of victims.
“What they do, rather than what they say, betrays who they are,” writes FBI expert Ronald Kessler of serial killers. “By reading those signs, profilers can often determine from the crime scene the kind of person who committed the crime and the fantasies that propelled him—in effect, the crimi- nal’s signature.”
Amerithrax’s other tools lay inside the glove box: one or two stoppered vials, a large sealable Baggie, a roll of cel- lophane tape, a wet sponge, and Clorox for disinfecting. He laid out the first letter and put spores from one vial into the center of the letter. In slow motion (quick movements stirred the stagnant air) he folded the letter with two horizontal folds. This was followed by two vertical folds on each side—a “pharmaceutical fold,” the way small portions of medicinal powders had been dispensed for centuries. This interior packaging was to keep the anthrax from escaping through the flap or corners of the envelope.
There were easier ways to fill an envelope with weapon- ized anthrax. Anthrax expert Martin Hugh-Jones suggested one. “You could go out early in the morning, with a few plastic bags,” he said, “and pour it into the letters in the open air. As long as you did it with the wind blowing left to right, say, across you, then you’d be pretty safe. What you don’t want is to have it blowing to your back—that creates turbulence and you’d inhale it.” Some in the FBI believed Amerithrax’s lab was outdoors; however, he prob- ably filled his envelopes in the following manner:
6
As was his practice, he had scissored off the bottom por- tion of the two one-page threats. First, a more square letter made for a neater pharmaceutical fold. Second, the copy machine may have made gripper marks that could be traced back to the photocopier he had used. “The original,” theo- rized case expert Ed Lake, “may have been written lower on the paper and when the copies were made the writing
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Cyber-sleuth Ed Lake theorized that this was the sequence in which the anthrax mailings were prepared.
Amerithrax slowly placed the folded letter into its en- velope and used the sponge to wet the glue on the flap. He was sweating under his hood. The roar of an oxygen tank filled his ears. Now the spores were doubly sealed against escape. When he had finished the second letter, Amerithrax used cellophane tape from a roll around the edges of both letters. Was this to prevent cross-contamination with the other mail or to keep the deadly germs inside so they would be at their deadliest when the envelope was opened? But the microscopic spores did leak out, giving anthrax to those who touched the unopened letter. Spores escaped through the very large, fifty-micron pores of the envelope. Whether by design or not, they contaminated the mail system and postal environments—and no one would know in time. All paper has invisible tiny openings (pores) and merely han- dling the unopened letter could give a person anthrax. Amer- ithrax put the sealed envelopes into the Baggie and used standard procedures to disinfect the outside of the Baggie and everything else still inside the glove box. Of course, he was inoculated with an anthrax vaccine.
When his work was done, Amerithrax removed the sealed, letter-filled Baggie from the glove box. Upon leaving his lab, Amerithrax underwent a final disinfecting procedure by showering with bleach. He shut off the compressed air. Unfastening his Hazmat suit, he slipped out of it and hung it up to dry.
Amerithrax’s second mailing was ready by Columbus Day, October 8. Postal deliveries to homes and businesses over the Monday holiday had been curtailed, but the post office was still pulling mail from neighborhood collection boxes. Typically a single employee at each office was as- signed to do a run on this not widely observed holiday. Mail processing facilities were operating with a skeleton crew.
All day television cameras had been running footage of nearly a thousand AMI employees and visitors to the six tabloids. They had lined up in Delray Beach in front of the county Health Department. President Bush was on the air
All of Amerithrax’s letters were mailed on Tuesdays, the same day of the week as the 9-11 attack. Amerithrax prob- ably made a broad daylight drop on a crowded corner at a major entrance to Princeton University. His secret means to deposit the letters and remain uncontaminated was evidently not a noticeable maneuver. Perhaps he dumped them inside from a larger Baggie. He pocketed the Baggie into a pocket filled with bleach and left the area. Death was on the wing now. Amerithrax could be anywhere in the nation, secure behind a false return address. He let the boundless facilities of the post office unwittingly act as his executioner by proxy. He had made the Postal Service his accomplice as it forwarded and delivered his deadly mail to his unsuspecting victims “like a missile,” according to the Postmaster Gen- eral.
